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Robert Reich: Where Is Trump’s Sense of Decency?

The Osprey assembly line at Boeing's Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, plant, on May 6, 2002. Robert Reich writes that Trump’s tendency to go after people who criticize him by sending false and provocative statements to his 16 million Twitter followers not only imperils those people and their organizations. It also poses a clear and present danger to our democracy.Tim Shaffer/reuters

On the evening of December 7, minutes after a local Indiana union leader, Chuck Jones, criticized Trump on CNN for falsely promising to keep Carrier jobs in the U.S., Trump tweeted, “Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!”

Since that tweet went out, Chuck Jones says, “I’m getting threats and everything else from some of his supporters.”

A few days before, Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenberg was quoted in the Chicago Tribune gently chiding Trump for being against trade. Muilenberg noted that trade is essential to the U.S. economy, as reflected in the “large and growing percentage of our business” coming from international sales, including commercial jet orders from China.

Moments later, Trump tweeted: “Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!”

Trump doesn’t take kindly to anyone criticizing him—not journalists (whom he refers to as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum” when they take him on), not corporate executives, not entertainers who satirize him, not local labor leaders, no one.

The president-elect’s tendency to go after people who criticize him by sending false and provocative statements to his 16 million Twitter followers not only imperils those people and their organizations.

It also poses a clear and present danger to our democracy.

Democracy depends on the freedom to criticize those in power without fear of retribution.

No president or president-elect in history has ever before publicly condemned individual citizens for criticizing him. That occurs in two-bit dictatorships intent on stamping out dissent.

No president or president-elect has ever before bypassed the media and spoken directly to large numbers of his followers in order to disparage individual citizens who criticize him. That occurred in the fascist rallies of the 1930s.

America came closest to this in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy wrecked the lives of thousands of American citizens whom he arbitrarily and carelessly claimed were Communists.

McCarthy’s reign of terror ended when a single man asked him publicly, during the televised hearings McCarthy was conducting, “Have you no decency, sir?” In that moment, Americans began to see McCarthy for the tyrant he was.

Trump’s capricious use of power to denigrate and even endanger his critics must end. He is not yet our president. When he becomes so, he will have far greater power. Our freedom and our democracy could be gravely jeopardized.

We must join together to condemn these acts. Has Trump no decency?

Robert Reich is the chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, and Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He has written 14 books, including the best-sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations and Beyond Outrage and, most recently, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-creator of the award-winning documentary Inequality for All .